“ At the same time, these stories touch on the very foundation of the internet economy and the way the websites that drive our internet economy make money. Some have professed themselves shocked -- shocked that companies like Facebook and Google share user data with advertisers.
Did any of these individuals ever stop to ask themselves why Facebook and Google didn't -- don't change -- don't charge for access? Nothing in life is free. Everything involves trade-offs. ”

“ To my mind, the issue here is transparency. It's consumer choice. Do users understand what they're agreeing to -- to when they access a website or agree to terms of service? Are websites up-front about how they extract value from users, or do they hide the ball?
Do consumers have the information they need to make an informed choice regarding whether or not to visit a particular website? ”

“ Thank you, Chairman Grassley.
Today's hearing is extraordinary. It's extraordinary to hold a joint committee hearing. It's even more extraordinary to have a single CEO testify before nearly half of the United States Senate.
But then, Facebook is pretty extraordinary. More than 2 billion people use Facebook every month. 1.4 billion people use it every day; more than the population of any country on Earth except China, and more than four times the population of the United States. ”

“ Every piece of content that you share on Facebook, you own and you have complete control over who sees it and -- and how you share it, and you can remove it at any time.
That's why every day, about 100 billion times a day, people come to one of our services and either post a photo or send a message to someone, because they know that they have that control and that who they say it's going to go to is going to be who sees the content. ”

“ ZUCKERBERG: Well, Senator, I think in this case, people certainly didn't expect this developer to sell the data to Cambridge Analytica. In general, there are two types of data that Facebook has.
The vast majority -- and then the first category, is content that people chose to share on the service themselves. So that's all the photos that you share, the posts that you make, what you think of as the Facebook service, right? That's -- everyone has control every single time that they go to share that. They can delete that data any time they want; full control, the majority of the data. ”

“ I started Facebook, I run it, and I'm responsible for what happens here.
So, now, we have to go through our -- all of our relationship with people and make sure that we're taking a broad enough view of our responsibility.
It's not enough to just connect people. We have to make sure that those connections are positive. It's not enough to just give people a voice. We need to make sure that people aren't using it to harm other people or to spread misinformation. And it's not enough to just give people control over their information. ”

“ This hearing is an opportunity to speak to those who believe in Facebook and those who are deeply skeptical about it. We are listening, America is listening and quite possibly the world is listening, too. ”

“ What we don't understand exactly, because both as a matter of practice and as a matter of not being able to decipher those terms of service and the privacy policy is what exactly are you doing with the data and do you draw a distinction between data collected in the process of utilizing the platform, and that which we clearly volunteer to the public to present ourselves to other Facebook users?
ZUCKERBERG: Senator, I'm not sure I -- I fully understand this. In -- in general, you -- your -- you -- people come to Facebook to share content with other people. ”

“ The idea that for every person who decided to try an app, information about nearly 300 other people was scraped from your service is, to put it mildly, disturbing.
And the fact that those 87 million people may have technically consented to making their data available doesn't make those people feel any better.
The recent revelation that malicious actors were able to utilize Facebook's default privacy settings to match e-mail addresses and phone numbers found on the so-called Dark Web to public Facebook profiles potentially affecting all Facebook users only adds fuel to the fire. ”

“ And we talked a little bit earlier around the complexity of laying out these long privacy policies. It's hard to say that people fully understand something when it's only written out in a long legal document. This needs -- the stuff needs to be implemented in a way where people can actually understand it, where consumers can -- can understand it, but that can also capture all the nuances of how these services work in a way that doesn't -- that's not overly restrictive on --on providing the services. That's one.
The second is around giving people complete control. ”

“ From what you've said today, and from previous statements made by you and other officials at your company, data is at the center of your business model. It's how you make money. Your ability to run your business effectively, given that you don't charge your users, is based on monetizing data.
And so the real issue, it seems to me, really comes down to what you tell the public, what you tell users of Facebook, about what you're going to do with the data. ”

“ I would differentiate between ISPs, which I consider to be the pipes of the internet, and the platforms like Facebook or Google or Twitter, YouTube that are the apps or platforms on top of that.
I think in general, the expectations that people have of the pipes are somewhat different from the platforms. So there might be areas where there needs to be more regulation in one and less in the other, but I think that there are going to be other places where there needs to be more regulation of the other type. ”

“ Chairman Grassley , Chairman Thune, thank you both for holding this hearing.
Mr. Zuckerberg, thank you for being here. You have a real opportunity this afternoon to lead the industry and demonstrate a meaningful commitment to protecting individual privacy.
We have learned over the past few months, and we've learned a great deal that's alarming. We've seen how foreign actors are abusing social media platforms like Facebook to interfere in elections and take millions of Americans' personal information without their knowledge in order to manipulate public opinion and target individual voters. ”

“ Just recently, we've seen the "Me Too" movement and the March for our Lives organized, at least in part, on Facebook. After Hurricane Harvey, people came together to raise more than $20 million for relief. And more than 70 million businesses -- small business use Facebook to create jobs and grow.
But it's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm, as well. And that goes for fake news, for foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy. ”

“ Data privacy should be tethered to consumer needs and expectations. Now, at a minimum, consumers must have the transparency necessary to make an informed decision about whether to share their data and how it can be used.
Consumers ought to have clearer information, not opaque policies and complex click-through consent pages. The tech industry has an obligation to respond to widespread and growing concerns over data privacy and security and to restore the public's trust. ”

“ Zuckerberg in 2004, Facebook has exploded over the past 14 years. Facebook currently has over 2 billion monthly active users across the world, over 25,000 employees, and offices in 13 U.S. cities and various other countries.
Like their expanding user base, the data collected on Facebook users has also skyrocketed. They have moved on from schools, likes and relationship statuses. Today, Facebook has access of data points, ranging from ads that you've clicked on, events you've attended and your location, based upon your mobile device. ”

“ ZUCKERBERG: What we allow is for advertisers to tell us who they want to reach, and then we do the placement. So, if an advertiser comes to us and says, "All right, I am a ski shop and I want to sell skis to women," then we might have some sense, because people shared skiing-related content, or said they were interested in that, they shared whether they're a woman, and then we can show the ads to the right people without that data ever changing hands and going to the advertiser. ”

“ Now, Facebook is an edge provider on the other hand. It is my understanding that many edge providers, such as Facebook, may not support that effort, because edge providers have different business models than the ISPs and should not be considered like services.
So, do you think we need consistent privacy protections for consumers across the entire internet ecosystem that are based on the type of consumer information being collected, used or shared, regardless of the entity doing the collecting, reusing or sharing? ”

“ Data has been used in advertising and political campaigns for decades. The amount and type of data obtained, however, has seen a very dramatic change. Campaigns including Presidents Bush, Obama and Trump all use these increasing amounts of data to focus on microtargeting and personalization over numerous social media platforms, and especially Facebook.
In fact, Presidents -- Obama's campaign developed an app utilizing the same Facebook feature as Cambridge Analytica to capture the information of not just the app's users, but millions of their friends. ”

“ Right now I am not convinced that Facebook's users have the information that they need to make meaningful choices.
In the past, many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle have been willing to defer to tech companies' efforts to regulate themselves, but this may be changing.
Just last month, in overwhelming bipartisan fashion, Congress voted to make it easier for prosecutors and victims to go after websites that knowingly facilitate sex trafficking. This should be a wake-up call for the tech community. ”

“ Are you actually considering having Facebook users pay for you not to use the information?
ZUCKERBERG: Senator, people have a control over how their information is used in ads in the product today. So if you want to have an experience where your ads aren't -- aren't targeted using all the information that we have available, you can turn off third-party information.
What we found is that even though some people don't like ads, people really don't like ads that aren't relevant. ”

“ We're talking about personally identifiable information that, if not kept by the social media -- media companies from theft, a value that we have in America, being our personal privacy -- we won't have it anymore. It's the advent of technology. ”

“ Facebook collects massive amounts of data from consumers, including content, networks, contact lists, device information, location, and information from third parties, yet your data policy is only a few pages long and provides consumers with only a few examples of what is collected and how it might be used. ”

“ He said, "So we connect more people. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people, more often, is de facto good." ”

“ But the reality is, there's a lot of examples where ad targeting has led to results that I think we would all disagree with or dislike or would concern us. You've already admitted that Facebook's own ad tools allow Russians to target users, voters based on racist or anti-Muslim or anti-immigrant views, and that that may have played a significant role in election here in United States. ”

“ There are all these different groups of people that someone might want to connect with, and those controls are very important in practice for the operation of the service. Not just to build trust, although I think that the providing people with control, also does that, but actually in order to make it so that people can fulfill their goals of the service. ”

“ In fact, Facebook claims that advertising makes it easy to find the right people, capture their attention and get results and you recognize that an ad-supported service is, as you said earlier today, best aligned with your mission and values. ”

“ Facebook generates -- generated $40 billion in revenue in 2017, with about 98 percent coming from advertising across Facebook and Instagram.
Significant data collection is also occurring at Google, Twitter, Apple, and Amazon. And even -- an ever-expanding portfolio of products and services offered by these companies grant endless opportunities to collect increasing amounts of information on their customers.
As we get more free or extremely low-cost services, the tradeoff for the American consumer is to provide more personal data. ”

“ To your broader point about the privacy policy, this gets into an -- an issue that I -- I think we and others in the tech industry have found challenging, which is that long privacy policies are very confusing. And if you make it long and spell out all the detail, then you're probably going to reduce the percent of people who read it and make it accessible to them. ”

“ Zuckerberg, I will say there are a great many Americans who I think are deeply concerned that that Facebook and other tech companies are engaged in a pervasive pattern of bias and political censorship. ”

“ Most of us understand that whether you are using Facebook or Google or some other online services, we are trading certain information about ourselves for free or low-cost services. But for this model to persist, both sides of the bargain need to know the stakes that are involved. ”